AVweb’s Friday Podcast: Peter Cohen, the Man Behind the Curtain at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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Key Takeaways:

  • Amazon's Mechanical Turk recently gained widespread recognition, particularly for its use in the search for Steve Fossett.
  • Tens of thousands of people utilized the platform to assist in tasks like identifying airplane wreckage.
  • The Mechanical Turk leverages human intelligence via the internet to perform tasks that computers are not adept at.
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Last week a lot of us added a new term to our technological lexicon. Not many of us had heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but by now tens of thousands of people all over the world, many of them AVweb readers, not only got familiar with it, they used it to help search for Steve Fossett. The Mechanical Turk uses the internet and computers to allow thousands of people to help perform a task that computers just aren’t good at, like picking out airplane wreckage. Peter Cohen runs the Mechanical Turk for Amazon, and he spoke with AVweb‘s Russ Niles.

Duration:

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